SimCity Videos

SimCity Disaster Trailer

70 Comments

SimCity Public Service Pictures presents How to Deal with Disasters. In SimCityyou never know when disasters will strike! Get a first look at what happens when a disaster hits and tips for how you can best rebuild your city. Did Howard of New Haven, Connecticut allocate space for police, fire and health in his megatropolis? Will he survive a meteor shower? Did Chelsia’s industrial city of Little Rock, Arkansas hold up after an earthquake? Or did Taylor’s modest community in Spokane, Washington recover smoothly from a tornado? Found out what happens when UFO’s attack and more!

Comments

I must say though, that meteor certainly sent hi-rise heaven to hell rather fast... And it really shows off how buildings fall apart this time around, and how stuff clutters the roads (a big pet peeve of mine was how road tiles disappeared in the previous versions when they got hit by tornadoes and meteors). A nice touch I might add...

I don't think they would showcase the physics in a dedicated trailer if they weren't close to done with it, that doesn't make sense
I just hope they polish it up a bit, mask those cracked polygons a bit better, add more particle effects, and improve the atmosphere all together.

Also ***MAXIS PLEASE READ***, you should at least make it so that a 3D pile of debris is left behind and not just a dark square. It would feel much more satisfying and surely can't be too difficult to implement. Add a few sims running around in despair combined with some leftover smoke and sounds of panic to greatly improve the post-disaster atmosphere.

It's not to keep people hyped only but to get feedback like yours. They need to see what people's opinions are and what they would love to be aded to the game. Not to say that they will put in your suggestions but they'll make improvements. They actually WANT to get negative feedback so they can improve. I am a designer myself and believe me, negative feedback is great in my opinion! Still love how far Sim City has come though

The engine can only do so much, so like the other guy said negative feedback is good, but there are also limitations to the engine and how the game will work out, for example with debris it would mean they would need to add more things to get like a CLEANING crew or something, the point of it is so you can rebuild faster and more efficiently, trust me to much realism is a bad thing in this case. But i agree with the animation of the destruction is a bit meh, but to me it is what it is. Look at the rest of the game tough they added SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much im sure you can let somethign small like this slip.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Sears (Oops, Willis) Tower, but it seemed a bit out of place among the 40-something floor buildings.

A developer has confirmed that there are more disasters than featured here.

And a little BTW to all the nay-sayers, this game is in ALPHA, don't expect everything to be exactly as it is now when it comes out. These guys still have November, December, and January (Not to mention most of February since the internet-focus of the game will make it easy to push out any updates after the discs begin to be produced) to refine this game and make it much better. Maxis knows what they are doing. (For example, after the 1st gameplay video last week, Maxis confirmed that RR Tracks won't have T-Intersections.)

Honestly, I kind of like how the buildings in this game have more color to them than they did in SC4. I got sick of all the brown, beige, tan, and clay colored buildings and the fact that they all looked all-too-Californian being that Sim City is supposed to allow me to build up cities from around the world. The healthy dosage of color goes well with the more "iconic" style of the buildings... I mean, wouldn't it be nice if we could recognize various buildings by their silhouettes just like in that one game I SHALL NOT MENTION DUE TO HOW EASILY UPSET NAY-SAYERS WILL GET ABOUT STYLIZED VIDEO GAMES.

Personally, I'm more concerned with what I can do in the game as opposed to how it looks. If I can build the Sea-WILLIS Tower in my city and stylize my buildings around it like the Chicago skyline (or maybe even the Tokyo skyline), then I'll be happy...

Yes, way too much Cali in many games. Especially anything tropical, and sometimes it's just so obviously West Coast. I'm NOT picking on EA, though. However .... c'mon, think global. Too many companies are in Cali, so this is unoriginal, too-saturated and therefore, more and more and more annoying and unacceptable. Game makers should be smarter than that. It's like one big company and CaliEarth, ew.

I seriously hope there is an easy way to prevent these Disasters! from happening *often*
like maybe...
-educated sims can come up with an invention to stop them or prevent them from happening a lot.
-buildings that can warn people that a tornado is coming so it does not destroyed everything.

Awesome lesson! ;-) I wish there were more of this for the uggo+quest+pop+$-loving players of Social. ;-) At least a couple of weeks ago, when I had houses not touching roads, even mere loiterers would get the building abandoned (OK not at all realistic, but still a consequence of uggo+pop, etc.). That was something; not sure if it still works that way, as it seems more allowed now, instead.

This is all very good, but can we turn off random disasters? If I've spent hours building up a city I don't want it destroyed by an unrealistic meteor shower. At least can we have the ability to revert to pre-disaster?

Where is my zombie disaster? Zombie outbreak would completely change the dynamic of the game. If it was fully developed it would make for very worth while DLC and I'm normally am against paying for DLC.

Why did you make this video? This is horrible. The strength of SimCity is the simulation engine. Of course we don't expect you to spend an inordinate amount of time on disaster simulation. So don't showcase it; it looks like shit.

People don't understand yet that this is a GAME! It does not have to be realistic to be fun, becuase SimCity 4 was not realistic either, why should the New SimCity be realistic, becuase it's 3D? Bad excuses, just bad... The game looks fairly Awsome! The game is still under development anyway, so stop complaining. Becuase 90% of us Logged in on SimCity.com (Here) Like the game. BTW- Who cares if it falls apart like legos, it makes it look better. And the suggestions like- "Make the buildings crumble like real life and make it have traffic and make it cost tons of money to clean it up", is very horrible... Maxis, keep up the good work! The game looks great so far

THIS ISN'T EVEN IN BETA YET.
what more do you guys want? and i'm sorry but if you want pure realism and don't want the buildings to "break like lego" surely you have the wrong game? isn't the whole point in The Sims and SimCity to be only mildly realistic with some amazing twists? look at The Sims Makin' Magic and the Cow Plant? I Love how SimCity is developing and am looking forward to the beta.

Ok, this maybe shouldn't be in the disaster thread, but what I would REALLY like to see, is: some Sims misbehaving, hating the mayor if he is not good. Not only in the "regular" crime, like we saw in the previous games, but Sims that won't pay taxes, poor Sims taking over abandoned buildings, or even building without a permit (outside the green zone). If you want to DeZone in real life it's very complex. People won't let you do it if they're still living there! I wanted to see this kind of administrative conflict in the game. Sims that will step in the way of the mayor and don't let you do something so you have to find a way around the problem.

Following on from a comment I made on another blog topic, I agree that buildings collapsing should be simulated properly. We no longer want to see skyscrapers breaking apart in a very linear fashion with a perfectly straight break line, we want to see buildings collapsing dramatically with tonnes of smoke and rubble left behind on multiple adjacent tiles. The way it collapses is key - let's make a next generation simcity for next-gen gaming. Let's not remake simcity 4 - please, we've waited a long time for this!

I sure hope certain things are improved in the future. The Sears/ Willis Tower for example in that video is represented as only about 40-50 stories based on the windows, but it is really 110 stories high. That makes the graphics look extremely childish and cartoonish like with Simcity Societies. Also, it looks a lot like Simcity Societies' placement of every single building. That was hated by almost every Simcity fan, including me. In reality, only buildings that are owned by the city are individually placed by the city. Everything else, is placed based on the street layout and zoning (that are themselves done by the city) and market demand for certain locations. Simcity 4 was done perfectly and the ultimate new city builder would be modern redo of Simcity 4!